Ask a Jewish Person

Just before 2 P.M. on Thursday, a twenty-seven-year-old man named Bill Glucroft climbed into a glass box in the Jewish Museum in Berlin. Almost immediately, he was surrounded by a group of museumgoers. For the next two hours, Glucroft, a Fairfield, Connecticut, native who moved to Berlin three and a half years ago when he fell in love with a woman from Neukölln, answered questions about God and the world—a genial, gray-jeans-wearing embodiment of the answer to the question posed in the bright-pink museum caption at his feet: “Are there still Jews in Germany?”

The Jewish Museum Berlin’s new exhibition “The Whole Truth… Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Jews” (the subtitle was inspired by Woody Allen), has on display a “Don’t Worry Be Happy” kippa. It has interviews with rabbis about what it means to be Jewish. It has a video of the “Curb Your Enthusiasm” episode where Larry David invites a contestant from the TV show “Survivor” and a Holocaust survivor to dinner. It also has that clear box, where a Jewish volunteer sits for a few hours every day (except Saturdays), and answers whatever questions visitors might have about Judaism.

The “Jew in a box”—as it has come to be known, both in the English-language press and among some who have sat in the box—has certainly elicited criticism. However, the experiment, which has been running for a week now, has plenty of supporters. Glucroft, for one, said he was game as soon as he received an e-mail from a friend asking if he would be interested. “When I heard I was going in the box, the first thing I thought of was Eichmann,” said Glucroft. “The next thing I thought of was Justin Timberlake.”

“Most Germans don’t know any Jews,” he added. “As a young twenty-first-century Jew, I don’t want to be defined solely by the Holocaust.”

“I think it’s fantastic,” Leeor Engländer, a columnist for Die Welt, said of the exhibit. “It’s one of the first times a Jewish museum in Germany has dealt with the everyday life of Jews. It’s a bit funny, it’s ironic, it’s not the old thing of talking about the Holocaust. In a way, it reminds me of the way Americans, or New Yorkers, deal with this topic.” Indeed, many of the objects in the exhibit are American—from Sarah Silverman’s “Wowschwitz” video to a handwritten sign from a New York restaurant that reads “THE CHINESE RESTAURANT ASSOCIATION OF THE UNITED STATES WOULD LIKE TO EXTEND OUR THANKS TO THE JEWISH PEOPLE. WE DO NOT COMPLETELY UNDERSTAND YOUR CUSTOMS… BUT WE ARE PROUD AND GRATEFUL THAT YOUR GOD INSISTS YOU EAT OUR FOOD ON CHRISTMAS.”

Because there are so few Jews in Germany—Engländer puts the number at around two hundred thousand—most Germans are deeply unfamiliar with Jewish culture. “Normally, in Germany, museums think, We have to explain to people that not all Jews are rich, we have to explain that not all Jews are observing Shabbat, we have to explain not all Jews are eating kosher,” he said. “When you are living in Germany as a Jew, you get so fed up with this.”

Engländer said that the glass box mirrors the way Germans treat Jews in post-Holocaust Germany. When he meets Germans, said Engländer, who is German and Jewish, they immediately want to talk to him about, say, kosher dietary restrictions, Israeli foreign policy, or their own feelings of guilt. “You can’t be incognito as a Jew in Germany—especially with a name like Leeor,” he said. “People ask me, ‘How do you feel, sitting in the box?’ I say, ‘It’s no different to be in this box or to be at a cocktail party.’ ”

“If there is a country that has tried to deal with its past, it is Germany,” said the curator Michal Friedlander. Nonetheless, stereotypes persist, and Friedlander hopes that “The Whole Truth” will help Germans challenge anti-Semitic beliefs, some of which they may not even be aware they hold. “This is an exhibition that is more about the visitors than it is about the objects,” she said.

Back at the box, three German teen-agers who were working on a school project asked if Glucroft, who works as a freelance English consultant for businesses, had encountered anti-Semitism since moving to Germany. “No,” he said. They asked if he went to a “house of worship.” “Sometimes,” he said. (After the kids had walked away, Glucroft confessed that he hadn’t mentioned that his favorite time to attend synagogue is on Purim, when drinking is encouraged: “What do they say? At Purim, you’re supposed to drink until you can’t tell Mordecai from Haman!”)

By a wall covered with pastel Post-it notes composed by visitors (“Chosen schmozen: people are people,” “What happened is very sad”), a fifteen-year-old named Max Hoffmann, who has one Jewish friend, said he thought the box was a good idea. “Now I understand Judaism much better. Before, it was just a religion and something from the Second World War. Of course, it’s completely sick what happened, but it was something from the past, I don’t have a personal connection. Now I understand it from the point of view of a Jewish person.”

Olga Mannheimer, a writer and journalist born in Warsaw, said that when she was in the box many Germans were afraid to ask questions. As time went by, people started to open up. One man recounted to her that when his mother was on her deathbed, she’d told him that his father was Jewish. The man asked Mannheimer’s advice on what to do next. Should he go to a rabbi? “I told him he had multiple options, and that there were books he could read,” she said. “He was really surprised to learn he was not alone, that other people have learned late in life of a Jewish family member.” “You become an authority figure,” she added. “It was very, very interesting.”

While Mannheimer said she doesn’t consider herself a representative of Judaism, and referred a visitor with a very detailed question about Bar Mitzvah texts to a rabbi (he had already asked a rabbi, he said, and the rabbi wasn’t sure, so he thought he’d ask her), there were questions she felt qualified to handle. “Someone asked if you can tell if someone is Jewish or non-Jewish German,” she said. “I said, Jews will never append additional signalization to qualify irony. If a German tells a joke, they always add, ‘that was a joke.’ A Jew wouldn’t do that.”

“Then there were the goyishe meshuggeners—the glass box was like a magnet for neurotics,” she added. “It was a confessional. But it was also an agora. People came by, and they wanted to talk about everything: The euro crisis, Cyprus, gay marriage. To them, I said, ‘Look, I am simply not the person to ask. I am not the person who has all the answers to these questions. That person is my hairdresser.’ ”

Photograph, of Leeor Engländer in the glass box, by Linus Lintner/Jüdisches Museum Berlin.

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